


Bonds Of Friendship

by shellcollector



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 19th Century Medicine, Alcohol, Broken Bones, Canon Era, Gen, Injury, Medical Procedures, Pre-Canon, Printer Enjolras, Terrible symbolic first name headcanons I'm sorry, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-16
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:04:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 12,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8572423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellcollector/pseuds/shellcollector
Summary: In 1826, a group of disreputable law students (to say nothing of Grantaire) keep running into a rival organisation with rather different convictions. They don't immediately hit it off.





	1. Chapter 1

Near the end of the spring of 1826, Jean-Chauvin Muriel Lesgle received a strange delegation. As he was just emerging from a lecture - he was halfway through his fifth and, he hoped, final year of law school - two men approached him. One was dressed sensibly but rather shabbily, in a short jacket and ill-cut trousers; his companion, fairer and somewhat taller, had worse trousers and no coat at all. In its place he wore a green wool cape with a fur collar. As he got closer Lesgle could see that it had got the moth rather badly.

“Are you M. Laigle?” asked the taller of the two.

Lesgle smiled pleasantly at them while he tried to mentally run through the men to whom he owed money. He didn’t think these two were among them; although his recollection of certain key periods of time was somewhat altered by wine and god knows what else, he’d always had a deliberate policy of not borrowing money from men whose clothes looked closer to falling apart than his own. A few years ago, when he first came to Paris, this had narrowed the pool of potential creditors considerably; now it did not, but these two would certainly not have passed muster.

Besides this, he was sure he would have remembered a cape.

The two men were still looking at him expectantly. M. the Cape was shifting from one foot to another.

“I’m minded to say I’m not he,” said Lesgle. “but I suppose that would as good as ensure that you were here to talk to me about an unexpected inheritance, or a rich lady who has fallen quite in love with me, or something of that sort. Let’s suppose I amthis Lesgle. What of it?”

“We —” began the Cape, then blushed. “It’s not — that is to say, w-we.”

He closed his eyes. Lesgle waited. The man seemed to be muttering to himself under his breath.

“W-w-we —” the Cape said again, blushing more furiously. Then another long pause. The shorter man shot him a look, more gentle than anything else, and the Cape gave a quick, miserable nod.

“We heard that you were part of an educational society,” said the shorter man, in accented French.

Lesgle’s mind went blank for a minute. Once more he found himself giving an affable smile while trying to consider what they might be driving at. It was too early in the morning for this.

(It was eleven.)

“We have a little group which offers free lessons to poor children,” the short fellow continued. His voice was firm but soft, and in other company he would not have seemed assertive. “We’ve also — ah, we’ve published a few pamphlets, and we heard by-the-by that you and your friends ran a similar organisation. It seemed logical to propose an alliance.”

Lesgle suddenly realised, with horror, what the man meant. “Oh,” he said, trying to keep a straight face, “You mean the _Society for Universal Education_?”

The man beamed.

Lesgle contorted his face into a pleasant smile. “How fortuitous that you should have discovered us,” he said. “However did you do so?”

“Oh,” said the Cape, with a sudden burst of enthusiasm and eloquence, “it was a couple of your schoolfellows, I think. We talked with them one evening over drinks — they said we absolutely must speak to you — that you had published a few things of your own, and that we might compare techniques and precepts.”

“Ho,” said Lesgle. “they did, did they?”

“They spoke very warmly of you, and of your philosophical principles,”

“And even more warmly of my friends, I imagine, the one with an unspeakable name, and the one with a single-letter name, and the one with no first name at all?”

“Quite as warmly, but no more. They esteem you all very highly, I think.”

“But, they said, the easiest to recognise, if you were looking for him, would be the fellow with a hundred names, since however much he rearranges the hair on his head he can’t stop the scalp showing through?”

The Cape blushed again, and looked at his feet.

“You were lucky I wasn’t wearing a hat,” said Lesgle, who had not had a hat since Grantaire sat on it a week ago.

 

“It’s a capital prank,” said speak-not-my-name de Courfeyrac. He was lying back on the sofa, with his head hanging upside-down off one end.

“I am going to find these men,” said Lesgles, “and flay them personally.”

“Are you sure it isn’t LLOLM himself? I wouldn’t put it past him at all.”

“I think he’d have had more sense. Now we’re in a difficult spot. They wanted to — hm — _exchange pamphlets_.”

“Well, I suppose that’s a way of getting people to read them.”

“Why yes, naturally. The world will be changed in just such-a way. We will all exchange pamphlets and mutually agree upon whose are the best.”

“Perhaps theirs will win.”

“Perhaps you should read them, and see if you still think so.”

Courfeyrac grinned. “You have some, then?”

“Oh yes.” Lesgle took one from his pocket. “Here’s a very long and, if I may say, somewhat over-discursive essay on the utter inadmissability of violence as a tactic, signed ‘Condorcet’ —”

“ _God._ ” Courfeyrac rolled his eyes — rolled them _down_ , in fact, since his head was still upended.

“Your curls will undo themselves,” Lesgle observed.

“Let them. I will curl them again.”

“We will curl them, you mean.”

“I am happy to do yours again, if you think it will help.”

They had thought perhaps Lesgle’s hair might cover more area curled than straight. It had not gone well. Lesgle shuddered.

“Here is a poem about a gentle maid who never let blood spot her hand, hm-hm, I do believe she is the republic. There is a verse about bats which I feel is not altogether to the point.”

“Bats are always to the point,” said a loud voice in the hallway outside.

“Bahorel, I just want to check,” Courfeyrac called out to him. “Did you by any chance set some pacifistic poets upon Lesgle?”

“No such thing,” proclaimed Bahorel, entering the room with characteristic subtlety. “A poem is a punch to the stomach, or else it’s a shopping list.”

“This one is a shopping list, then, surely,” said Lesgle. “One pound liberty, weighed and bagged, not to be paid for.”

Bahorel had taken the paper. He read it, tilted his head to one side, and read it again.

“Lesgle, I love you dearly, but you’re a dolt,” he said, putting the pamphlet in his pocket.

“Also, have you seen Grantaire?” asked Courfeyrac. “I mislaid him last night.”

“Where did you put him down?” asked Bahorel. “That’s always a good place to start, with lost things.”

 

Lesgle had thought that perhaps, fate being done with this particular way of needling him, he would not see the men - or hear of their _Human Liberation League -_ again. The next day he broke one of the legs of Courfeyrac’s sofa, by sitting on it too suddenly, which gave this conviction a certain solidity; she had surely moved on. His bed gone, and feeling rather sheepish about the whole circumstance, he made himself scarce for a few days. This was where a friend like Grantaire was invaluable; there was always space on his floor, even if one did have to clear away some number of chairs, dirty linens, rags soaked in turpentine, and so forth, in order to find it.

Grantaire’s hospitality did come with certain obligations, however; Lesgle was sleeping off his third night in a row spent carousing when he was woken by the sound of thumping on the door.

“In God’s name,” called out Grantaire from where he had fallen. “In the name of all the angels, and of the Blessed Virgin, and the Prophets, and Plutos Lord of the Underworld, will someone please end this racket, before it ends me.”

The door thudded again. Lesgle’s brain seemed to be bursting with gunpowder; every thump was the discharge of a cannon.

“It’s your apartment,” he said. “It’s probably for you.”

“It is my apartment and so I can say that it’s for you, and it will be so; tyrants maydictate what truth is. And besides, you are closer to the door.”

Lesgle got up. His stomach lurched. Swallowing hard, he managed to get to the door and opened it.

“You look vile,” said Bahorel, who looked magnificent.

“I feel worse than I look, I’m sure,” said Lesgle.

“You look like the squashed insect I scraped off my shoe last week.”

“I feel like the insect’s week-old remains. Why on earth are you here so early?”

Bahorel did not attempt to quibble regarding the definition of the word ‘early’. His sigh, however, was expressive enough.

“Listen,” he said. “I need you to go along to Enjolras and Sons this afternoon. We’ve a delivery here and I can’t get it myself; I need to be elsewhere.”

Lesgle did not bother asking for an explanation. “All right,” he said.

“Try to leave Grantaire at home.”

“Right. I will.”

 

Grantaire would not be left at home.

“And why shouldn’t I come?” he asked. “My heart may not be pure, but it’s honest; and isn’t honesty a sort of purity? Heavy-hearted at times, perhaps, but what does such weight amount to? Put it in the balance, and you’ll find the feather of truth is not so light.”

“I’m just going to the printer’s, Grantaire,” said Lesgle. “It’ll be boring.”

“Can I not be bored there just as well as here? Is tedium a forbidden passion? And anyway, I’m never bored with you, my dear Lesgle, since there’s always the suspense of finding out what disasters are in store for you. Perhaps the apprentices will mistake the blank sheet of your scalp for a ream of paper, and attempt to impress a sermon upon it. And would you have me miss that, sitting at home with my embroidery, eating seed cake like a spinster? You’re a hard-hearted brute.”

Bahorel would not be happy with Lesgle for giving in; but Bahorel was not there. He would have got Courfeyrac to play nursemaid, but Courfeyrac was having a picnic with a lady in the Jardin des Plantes.

Thus it was that they set off for the printer’s together.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Enjolras & Sons was misnamed. Master Enjolras had no sons, only a daughter, nice in the face but too serious to be altogether pretty. She helped him out with the bookkeeping from time to time, but he was somewhat overprotective; he was aware, perhaps, how easy it was for struggling poets and pamphleteers alike to confuse true love with the desire for a good dinner and a nice set of furniture. If she was not exactly bourgeois, that made her if anything more attractive to the Bohemian set: one might become rich without pleasing one’s parents a jot. Courfeyrac scarcely needed a good marriage to keep him in waistcoats, but he had been known to wonder plaintively, once or a hundred-and-twice, whether she mightn’t smile more if she were allowed to go out to the theatre with a fellow sometimes.

Master Enjolras was, in reality, one of the original _& Sons_. His younger brother had married and moved back to Puy. Thus, presumably, ended the dynasty: the Master would die, the daughter would marry someone respectable, the shop would be sold up and the proceeds given as a dowry to a gentleman especially chosen for having no need of them. The original Old Master Enjolras, whom Lesgle had never met, would watch from beyond the grave as the work of his life was taken apart and packed away.

From here, Lesgle began to reflect upon the general pattern of fathers disappointed in their offspring and their legacy. Then he stopped himself in this morbid train of thought, which, he saw quite clearly now, had nothing to do with the fate of the Enjolras printing house at all. The true culprit was far closer to home.

“Grantaire,” he said decisively, as they turned onto Rue de l'École de Médecine, “Let’s never drink absinthe again.”

“A capital resolution,” agreed Grantaire. He looked more than usually morose and clammy. “It is the most disgusting of liquors. Drain the worst slums and hellholes in the country of their damp humours, and you will have one third of the recipe. Lance the abscesses of the human soul and the pus you collect is the second ingredient. The third part is pure bile, which is used to impart a deceptively lively shade of green. The consumption of absinthe is testament to the corrupting force of civilisation. Natural man is repelled by its bitterness; to overcome this is the work of culture, and yet a man so cultivated falls thereby into a far deeper abyss of barbarism, a more profound swinishness, than can ever be seen in the savage.” 

He carried on in this vein. Lesgle remembered that there was a mostly-untouched bottle of absinthe back at the flat. There was, he realised, a certain inevitability to their finishing it off before the night was done.

The city seemed especially _filthy,_ that afternoon; the air was thick with a sort of charcoal grit that clung to everything and stuck to the skin of anyone walking through it. The sky was a grimy grey; it had rained just enough to make mud; Lesgle’s head throbbed. They passed a cheese shop and his stomach began once more to lurch. 

“Let’s not take too long about this,” he said. “We go in, pick up the pamphlets, go back and sleep it off.”

“L’Aigle, you take the words out of my mouth,” said Grantaire, grimly. 

Lesgle doubted this was possible, but he was not in a mood to dispute it.

 

By the time they arrived at the printshop, Lesgle was starting to deeply regret the breakfast of bread and tea he had taken before leaving Grantaire's apartment. He’d thought perhaps it would settle his stomach, but it was now dawning upon him that in this he had made a grave error. He set his jaw, and entered. A small bell on the door made a tinkling sound, the sensation of which was not unlike that of a hatpin stabbing him in the eardrums. He smiled pleasantly. 

“We’re here to pick up an order for the _Society for Universal Education_ ,” he said. 

The apprentice nodded. “You can wait in the side office,” he said. “Someone will be with you shortly.” 

He disappeared into a thicket of hanging paper. The smell of ink and the thudding of the presses were starting to make Lesgle feel woozy; he was happy to make his way through to the relative calm of the small sideroom. There was even a chair. He sat down in it and rested his head gently upon his hands.

“Oh, I see how it is,” said Grantaire. “You demand that I accompany you on this fool’s errand and then insist that I must stand and entertain you, like some king’s jester. As for the gold in which I am paid, I have suspicions of it.”

“I wasn't aware,” said Lesgle, “that I was paying you at all.”

Grantaire's eyes widened. “And is friendship no coin, then, by your reckoning? Ah, you are right. It is a gilded chain, it swaps peace for solicitude and freedom for obligation; why, I could be at home now eating seed-cake, as happy as a bird, if it weren’t for the obligations I bear to you as a friend. Still, I cannot deny that it wounds me to hear you discount it so. Such is — ”

He was interrupted by the entrance of a person who was decidedly _not_ M. Enjolras, carrying a box. Lesgle's first thought was that Mlle. Juliette had grown taller, and prettier, and begun to wear trousers. Then the implausibility of this impressed itself upon him. Then he realised that he was still seated, and that Grantaire was still standing in place smiling idiotically, and that this was no way to behave. 

He rose to his feet. Sadly, his stomach, having a somewhat different view of etiquette, remained behind him on the seat of the chair. Dark stars swam before his eyes.

“I imagine those are our pamphlets,” he said, weakly, taking the box. “They have been paid for, haven’t they? I think my friend said they had.”

“Would that be Citizen La-Liberté-Ou-La-Mort Bahorel?” the youth asked, his voice surprisingly manly and clear. “I was hoping to meet him today. In his essay —”

“Certainly, you must meet him,” said Grantaire, who seemed to have found his tongue, even if his voice sounded odd.“He is a dear friend, and I am sure — I am _quite_ sure — that he would be more than eager for such a meeting.”

The youth smiled. “Of course. And I shouldn’t have let my enthusiasm get in the way of an introduction. My name is Michel Enjolras, and I am very pleased to meet the two of you. Any friend of the people is a friend of mine.”

In the usual run of things, Lesgle would have been inclined to smirk at such ingenuousness; perhaps it was only the absence of his stomach which cut him off from his own bile. All he seemed able to notice was the very subtle way that young Michel Enjolras (and who was this? A long-lost son, or some provincial cousin? The accent suggested the latter.) shrunk back from them, even as he extended his greeting. It suggested a fastidiousness Lesgle did not know how to interpret. In women, it usually meant that he would get no joy out of repeated sallies. Here, it only reminded him that neither of them had bathed or changed their clothes since the previous day, and that they probably smelled quite foul. 

Grantaire said, in the same low, soft voice as before, “I’m pleased to meet you too. Florian Grantaire, and this is our friend Lesgle.”

He reached out a surprisingly tentative hand in greeting, and young Enjolras seemed to be resolved, despite his fastidiousness, to take it. 

It was at this point that Lesgle’s stomach finally rejoined the rest of him. In its enthusiasm it overshot somewhat. Perhaps half a second passed between the dawning certainty that he was about to be sick and the heaving reality of it. He tried to move the box ofpamphlets out of the way, but succeeded only in creating a path for the vomit whereby it struck both the box (just at that place in the corner where it was not entirely closed), and the sleeves of his coat. A second wave, bitter and bilious and liquid, swam up to follow the first and sink it more deeply into both fabric and paper. 

He looked up. Both Grantaire and young Michel Enjolras were staring at him with quite different, but somehow parallel, expressions of horror. Not for the first time in his life, he felt an intense disbelief in the reality of events. 

“I can’t apologise enough,” he said. “I didn’t think I was so unwell. Obviously these will have to be disposed of, you can leave that to me, I will pay for a set of replacements. I don’t think it’s got on the carpet. Ah, just a little.”

“Do you need us to call a doctor?” asked young Enjolras. “I know one or two. Not well, but they’re good friends of the shop, and I’m sure they would come, if I sent for them.”

“Ah, no,” said Lesgle breezily. “No need for that. I have a weak stomach, that’s all. It’s a constitutional thing, quite beyond remedy.”

“How very unfortunate,” said Enjolras. Lesgle searched his face for a hint of irony, but could not find one, only a deep concern. 

“Well, I’d better get this mess out of here,” he said. “Don’t want the odour to take hold. When do you think you could have a second set ready? That is, assuming you’re able to, I do apologise once again for the inconvenience.”

Bahorel was going to kill him. He would be bodily ripped limb from limb.

“I think we could have them ready the day after tomorrow,” said Enjolras. “I wish I could get them done sooner, but with tomorrow being Sunday, and since we’d already disassembled the plates—”

“No, of course,” said Lesgle. Bahorel was going to _kill him._ “I’m only very grateful that you’re able to do the work. Here, I’ll pay you now, Grantaire, would you mind taking my purse from my coat pocket for me, I don’t want to — thank you.”

Grantaire had said nothing. He wordlessly counted out the notes. It left the purse very thin indeed. 


	3. Chapter 3

Somehow neither of them said very much on the way back to Grantaire’s flat. Lesgle was still carrying the box of soiled pamphlets; he didn’t quite know what was to be done with them.

“I suppose we’ll have to burn them in the fire,” he said, when they finally got in through the door. 

Grantaire shrugged. He had sat himself on the armchair, and Lesgle wondered if he were perhaps still feeling ill. Lesgle’s head, on the other hand, seemed to have benefitted from the purging; it was now quite clear, and he wished it weren’t. 

“You know,” he said, as he was picking the papers out to put them into the grate, “Some of these aren’t altogether ruined, at least the ones towards the bottom. Possibly if we used a little water —”

“I don’t know why you’d want to keep them, except as a memorial to your own incompetence,” said Grantaire. There was an edge to his tone.

“Ah well, I’m sure you’re right. Let’s burn the lot.”

Lesgle lit the fire, and the papers began to dance with flame. 

“Now,” he said, poking at the grate, “As for my coat, I think I can rinse it out, perhaps?”

“Oh, by all means,” said Grantaire. “Use my water and slop it all over the place. My floor is covered in your clothes, my rooms are overheating, my head is very bad, I cannot get a moment to myself —”

“My dear fellow,” said Lesgle hopelessly, “I had no idea you were so unhappy.”

“Well, how should you get an idea? You never ask, you turn up here at three in the afternoon looking for a bed, I turn my home over to you for god knows how long, and here we are.”

“If you had told me —”

“Oh! L’Aigle is so humble, he does not wish to impose, if only he knew, if only I had _said something_. Like the villain that I am, I must say, ‘no, I cannot give you my charity, I am a hard-hearted brute, I do not have an ounce of goodness in my heart.’ Well, what if I am? Yesterday I walked past a beggar child who was sitting on the street. She had a man’s hat laid before her, and she had no hands. I gave her nothing! I pretended I did not see. She had no hands and I pretended I had no eyes, in order to conceal the fact that I had no heart. So the great machine of the world moves forwards. I am no worse than all the other fellows who walked past her; mankind in general is pitiless. But to turn away my friend, when all I want is a quiet afternoon, perhaps some time to read, perhaps the opportunity to meet other friends, why, that is not to be allowed. ‘But of course,’ I say. ‘Come in, L’Aigle, my friend, drink my wine, rip the pages of my books, break my china. It is always such a delight to have you here.’”

Lesgle was floored.

“I can certainly leave, if that’s what you want,” he said. 

“You can leave, but can you give my time back to me? _Damna fleo rerum, sed plus fleo damna dierum; rex potest rebus succurrere, nemo diebus._ ”

There was no answering this. Lesgle gathered his things and made quickly for the door.

 

“I wouldn’t take him too seriously,” said Courfeyrac. The two of them were eating the leftover pastries from Courfeyrac’s picnic. The afternoon was ending in golden light; birds called to one another from the budding trees. 

“At any rate, I mean to steer clear of him for a few days,” said Lesgle. “I don’t quite know what came over him; I don’t think I’ve ever seen him really angry before, not just for show.”

“Who ever knows what is going on in R’s head? I’m sure he’ll settle himself if we give him time. Where are you sleeping, in the meantime?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” admitted Lesgle. “You see, it seemed like a good idea to keep my distance from Bahorel as well —”

“— I agree, that might be wise.”

“— and, well, the end result is that I don’t have very many choices.”

“Meaning, your choices come down to me, I suppose?”

“More or less.”

Courfeyrac laughed. “Well, that’s no problem. I have a little engagement for the next few days — a rather delicious redhead and I are taking a trip up to her family’s country villa — but you can take my key, and the bed. Just try not to break it, there’s a good chap.”

“I’m truly sorry about your sofa.”

“Don’t be. I realised as soon as you’d left that it was an awful bourgeois affectation, and I won’t be replacing it. I’ve a second mattress on the bed and a heap of cushions; what more does any man need?”

“I congratulate you on your social descent, Citizen de Courfeyrac. Why, if you keep going at this pace, perhaps you can persuade Bahorel to induct you into the ranks of the peasantry before the year is out.”

“You should take one of my old coats, too. They’re at the back of the wardrobe. That one has a sort of miasmic haze about it.”

“I did try to get the worst of it off.”

“My dear friend, I’ve been terribly polite, but you may have noticed I positioned myself downwind of you. I definitely wouldn’t want to share a small room with that thing.”

“It’s a shame,” said Lesgle. “It was just getting to that nice worn stage — you know what I’m talking about, when the wool gets soft and sort of adjusts itself to fit you.”

“I can’t say that I do know, honestly. When I want a coat adjusting I go to my tailor. Do you want to split the last éclair in half?”

When the éclair was finished, they divided the remaining petits-fours between them and parted company. 

“You should get my landlady to make you dinner,” said Courfeyrac, handing him the keys and a marzipan slice. “She adores me. She’s always trying to feed me stews, ghastly Northern things; you’ll love them. Tell her you’re my friend, and you’ll eat enough for a fortnight.”

Lesgle walked towards Courfeyrac’s apartment with a mouth full of whipped cream and hazelnuts, and a warm satisfaction with his lot in life. 

 

“I mean it, I will call for the police! This is a respectable house!”

Courfeyrac’s landlady had a small copper milk-pan raised above her head. It was not quite large enough to be a truly formidable weapon, but nor was it small enough to disregard entirely. 

“He lent me his key,” insisted Lesgle, his voice a little hoarse. “I would have it still, if I hadn’t been struck by the carriage — at least, I’m sure that’s where it must have come out of my pocket — see, and that’s when my trousers were ripped.”

“The _idea_ ,” said the landlady, with indignation. “The _idea_ that poor dear Charles-Philippe would invite a ragged hobbledehoy into the house. The _notion._ ”

“But I’ve been here before, Madame. You’ve seen me on the stairs.”

“I have never seen you before in my life. Ah! I run a respectable establishment, not some doss house where mud-covered vagrants stinking of the sewers can pass in and out as they please.”

The porch roof rumbled with driving rain. Lesgle shivered.

“Madame Muller,” he said. “Only let me into the apartment, and I will be able to retrieve the spare key my friend keeps in the desk drawer next to a roll of tobacco. I can describe his rooms in the minutest detail for you. On the wall opposite the door —”

“Thief!” Madame Muller’s voice took on a hysterical edge. “Oh, you’ve cased out the place, have you? How many of you are there? How did you learn my name! Do you mean to murder me too? Well, I shan’t let you! I’m not some helpless old woman, I fought in the Vendée! I have a scar on my shoulder from a sword. Just try it!”

“Citizen Muller,” began Lesgle, but she swung the milk pan at him. It seemed like a good time to retreat.

 

Discouraged, he went to a wine-shop, spent almost all his remaining money on a bottle, and tried to make it last as long as he could. The other customers gave him a wide berth; and, truth be told, it was hard to deny that the warm room was causing vapours to rise from the coat which were not entirely agreeable. When the bottle was finished, he made a gentle suggestion of credit, which was not quite so gently rebuffed. 

He wandered out into the night; it had, at least, stopped raining. He had spent nights out on the street before; the thing was to walk until it was getting near morning, and then find somewhere quiet and unoccupied to sleep. The wine had warmed and softened him, and for the first hour or so he was charmed by the lights of the city, by the spring air, by the sounds of the river. 

It was only after the clock had struck one that he started to feel damp and weary. It had begun to drizzle again. He found a doorway and curled up in its corner, letting the alcohol pull him into a dead sleep. 


	4. Chapter 4

He awoke to children’s voices. He blinked his eyes open; a very small boy and girl were pelting him with single pieces of gravel. 

“He opened his eyes!” cried the girl. “Did you see that! I woke him! I won!”

“You did not!” replied the boy. “It was my stone hit him on the nose.”

“It never hit him, stupid. It went right past his ear.”

“It bounced off!”

Lesgle was still half awake, but he lifted himself up onto his elbow. The children retreated a few steps, fearful but fascinated. 

“If I may adjudicate,” he said, “I think it was a team effort. Neither of you could have woken me up on your own; the stones were too small. But both of you together, well, that’s a different story.”

“We haven’t hurt you, m’sieur?” asked the small boy. 

Lesgle smiled. “Not this time.” 

He yawned.

“He wanted to sleep,” said the girl, sadly. 

“A bit,” said Lesgle. “Now I want breakfast. Do you want to join me?”

 

They got some good bread (“Oh! it’s so soft!” said the girl) with the last of Lesgle’s money, and ate it while walking together. When it was all finished, they shook hands and parted company. Lesgle tried to take stock of himself. It was Sunday; he had no money, and had got wet and cold in the night; he rather suspected that while he was sleeping it had rained again. The beginnings of a cold were hovering around his throat and chest.

It was time for desperate measures.

 

“Grantaire!” Lesgle shouted through the keyhole. He gave the door another thump. “Grantaire, I know you’re in there!”

The door to the neighbour flat opened, and Lesgle stood up, suddenly aware of having been rather rambunctious, considering it was a Sunday morning. A short, plumpish young lady emerged, nicely dressed despite the early hour, a look of curiosity and amusement spreading over her face. 

“I’m sorry,” said Lesgle, and then, “Madame.”

She smiled. Her eyes were very large and dark. “He’s not there, you know.”

“Oh.”

“He’s often back late, but then sometimes he doesn’t come in at all. I suspected at first that he might be a werewolf, but I’ve checked the pattern against a lunar calendar and it can’t be made to correspond."

There was a dimple in her cheek; he couldn't honestly tell if she was laughing at him or not. It was delightful. 

"I would propose vampirism," she said, "but I don’t think I’ve ever read of a vampire who wasn’t a picture of elegance and sensual allure. Have you?”

“Not recently.”

“I am very fond of vampires.” She had brought her fingers up to her throat, and unconsciously felt at the skin there. Her hands were extremely small.

“I’ll try not to disturb you any more.”

“Thank you, you’re very kind. I am trying to read.”

She ducked back behind the door again; he heard it click in the latch, and then the indistinct murmur of voices, one of whom was certainly male. Lesgle swore under his breath. It usually took less time for this cycle to occur; this was a new low point.

 

He spent a good part of the day skipping from one Mass to another, although his fellow congregants glared at him because he kept coughing and did not know the hymns. But it was raining again, and he didn’t care to be outside; and besides, he was trying to avoid Bahorel, and these were the best places bar the law school to avoid running into him. 

What he hadn't reckoned for was Bahorel's ability to be somehow in all of Paris at once, rather as certain theologians held the Lord himself to be. It was while walking briskly through the rain from one church to another that Lesgle was spotted; he tried valiantly to pretend he had not noticed Bahorel hurrying towards him, instead speeding up and wrapping the remains of his coat close around him. He managed to get into the church before Bahorel caught up, and sat down in a pew, closing his eyes and sighing with relief as the damp rose off his clothes. 

When he opened them again, Bahorel was sitting beside him. 

He gave Bahorel a Look, and Bahorel gave him a grin. He kept grinning all the way through the service. When it was done, some half-a-dozen men and women hurried over to greet Bahorel; Lesgle tried to make an escape while he was embracing them, but Bahorel caught him by the elbow. 

“My dear Jean-Chauvin,” he said, still grinning. “I did not see you as a convert.”

“La-liberté-ou-la-mort, I did not see you as a godly man.”

“We surprise one another. Such is friendship. Now, what have you done with my pamphlets? And what have you done with Grantaire? He seems to have disappeared into an extremely low wine-shop some time early yesterday evening, but nobody has seen him since. The print-shop is closed. Did you fellows sleep through? And how have you managed to destroy your clothes even more thoroughly than before?”

Lesgle had a brief fantasy of allowing this lesser shame to replace the greater one, but lying to Bahorel was never a wise strategy. He gave as brief and attenuated an account of the previous day’s events as he could, and braced himself for one of Bahorel’s legendary rages. Bahorel’s face was already nearly purple. 

When he had stopped talking, Bahorel screwed up his eyes; his cheeks’ colour darkened still further. His mouth twisted. Then the explosion occurred; he burst forth in extremely raucous laughter. 

The remaining churchgoers glared at them both. Lesgle hustled Bahorel out. Bahorel continued to laugh. There were tears squeezing from the corners of his eyes. 

“Why did I not foresee this?” he asked. “but then again… how could I have foreseen this? You are incorrigible. My god, I can’t breathe.”

It took him some time to regain his composure. 

“My dear, dear Lesgle,” he said, “You had better come back with me.”

 

They walked briskly to Bahorel’s rooms. On the way, Bahorel was several times overcome by fits of laughter, and Lesgle by fits of coughing. 

“Damp,” said Bahorel. “My mother always says this is the worst sort of weather for colds. Then again, she believes in swallowing live frogs, to stop a cough. Have you ever swallowed a live frog?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Of course not, you’re far too bourgeois and far too Northern for anything so sensible.”

It seemed to Lesgle that this stretched the use of the word ‘sensible’ to its breaking point; but he refrained from comment. 

“Wouldn’t know where to find them anyway, not in this city.”

“What a shame”

“Hmmph.”

Bahorel was unlocking the door. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get you dried and bedded down, and tomorrow morning we can go to the printshop and make our apologies.”

Lesgle nodded. Now that it looked as if he would be able to rest, he felt rather tired, in a comfortable sort of way. They bustled into the room. 

Bahorel’s mistress, encircled by candles and lying naked on the bed, except for a pair of embroidered stockings and a strategically-placed human skull, let out a scream and dropped her book. 

As it was falling, its pages caught on one of the candles and leapt into flame. Bahorel swore, seized a half-empty bottle of wine from the floor, and tipped it over the book, the candle, the sheets and her thigh. His mistress screamed again. Then she started to giggle. 

“Oh my god,” she said. “Well, this was a mistake. I hoped to surprise you.”

Bahorel seemed to have suffered a relapse of his earlier laughing fit. “You did,” he choked out, insofar as he was able. “It was… ah…. it was a great surprise.”

It occurred to Lesgle that he ought to be elsewhere, so he withdrew into the hallway. He was, in fact, not unfamiliar with the particulars of Bahorel’s mistress’ naked form, but he generally tried not to dwell on those memories, or to appear in any way to allude to them. Things were awkward enough between the two of them, as it was. While it did not bother him greatly that she had transferred her affections — after all, he was hardly unfamiliar with such circumstances — she seemed to expect that it would, or else to have some lingering discomfort of her own. She was, in general, discomposed in his presence, even when she was clothed and not covered in wine and scraps of charred paper. 

Lesgle waited in the hall, coughing a little while the laughter became lower and gave way to murmurs and heavy breathing. He wondered whether he could find someone else to stay the night with — perhaps one of the fellows from the law school, most of whom he had written off as being too boring for words, but who surely wouldn’t be worse companions than a wet night and a bad chest. 

Before Lesgle could act on any of these speculations, Bahorel emerged.

“What are we to do with you?” he asked. “I am afraid your young mind will be irretrievably damaged if you remain in my rooms; I do not want to be held responsible for the warping of your moral character. Can I trust you to check into an hotel? I think this should cover the cost, more or less.”

He handed Lesgle a five-louis note with a casual air, as if he weren’t perfectly aware that it was far more than was needed. 

“Now listen,” he said, taking Lesgle by the shoulders. “Go straight to the nearest hotel — no, better, go straight to Mme Vasquez’, it’s two streets from here, tell her I sent you. Get yourself a room and order up a good dinner and a bottle of something pleasant. And for heaven’s sake, try not to get yourself into any more scrapes.”


	5. Chapter 5

“And you’re really from Meaux?”

The lady was really very pretty. Lesgle was really very drunk.

“But of course,” he said, trying to lean forward sensually but missing the edge of the table. “I’m the heir to a postal fortune. Or was the heir. Once I was an heir, once I had hair; loss and decay come to all things.”

“But you’re L’Aigle from Meaux? Like the theologian?”

“I can see that you’re not nearly drunk enough. Certainly not so drunk as I am. Another drink and you will forget all theologians, another still and you will forget all poets; keep drinking and you will forget that which is heaven and which is earth, and what names we call either.”

“Poets are terrible things, L’Aigle de Meaux. Stay away from them if you can. They tell you your throat is curved like a crescent moon, or your eyes are as grey as Athena’s, and then they stand you up for dinner. From now on I will only consort with theologians.”

“I tell you, I have no gods but Mammon. Mine is the theosid - theodicy of the purse. The holy Louis, and you, his worthy daughter.”

“That is a quotation! You don’t fool me, M. Theologian.”

“Fool yourself if you wish; I have been in churches all day and saw no worship but that of Saint Gold and Our Lady Of Silver. Now I have five Louis, and I am become a god myself. The city falls at my feet.”

He was talking very loudly, which brought the coughing on again.

In truth, rather less of Bahorel’s generous gift still remained. He had made his way to the hotel, but found it was full; passing a wine-shop, it occurred him that it might do to settle some of his debts there, and order a cup of brandy. Things might have ended there, if he hadn’t run into a pretty girl sitting by herself, which was surely an evil no just god could have sanctioned. 

They had eaten well, and drunk even better. 

The lady was pensive, and silent for a while. “I think a man may go far,” she said finally, “with a golden voice and a silver tongue.”

“You are thinking of your poet again; put him from your mind. Embrace the material.” 

He raised an eyebrow; she smiled wistfully.

“I wasn’t thinking of my poet at all. Do you think I’m talking to you only because you have paid for my dinner, my theologian?”

“I think that my boots are wet, and my feet are getting cold inside them.”

“You poor dear.”

“I mean it,” he said. “My boots are full of rainwater, and my trousers are torn.”

“Torn trousers? We shall have to get them off you. Why don’t we find a room where you and I can lie down?”

“No.” He really did feel cold, a sort of shivery bone-coldness. “I can’t stand it any longer. I shall have dry feet, if I have nothing else.” 

He bent over and began to fumble with the laces. His hands were clumsy.

She giggled tipsily. “Do you need any help?”

“Yes,” he said, “Give me help. Get down on your knees, daughter of the sainted Five Louis, and pull my boots off.”

It was a relief to free his feet. He stretched them towards the fire.

“Come, Monsignor Bossuet,” said the girl. “You look like you might fall asleep, and I can’t have that. Let’s find a room.”

She tugged him up by the arm. His stockings had holes in; he could feel the floor through them. 

Then the girl said, “Oh!” and then “Jean!”

M. the Cape had walked into the wine-shop.

On this occasion, he seemed to be dressed like some sort of mediaeval prince, except for his feet, which were clad in rather mudstained Turkish slippers. He looked somewhat ashamed of himself.

“I — I must beg your pardon, my Sophia” he said, awkwardly. “I was — oh! — you!”

He had seen Lesgle. 

“This is Bossuet of Meaux,” said the lady. “He has been enlightening my spirit, while I waited for you. For some time.”

“Yes, yes,” said the poet. “A thousand apologies, and then a hundred more. I was dreaming, and the clock seemed to slip away from me; I travelled in fairy realms and journeyed among goblins, and when I returned to the earth it struck me that I was late to dinner.”

“You’re a fool.” She said it fondly, though she had not left off holding Lesgle by the arm. 

“Without you, I have no wisdom whatsoever, as you see. It is only in your presence, O wise Goddess, that the owl flies at all.”

“If your actions in my presence are what you consider to be wisdom, I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Only tell me that you forgive me.”

“If I do that, I’ll have to beg forgiveness myself. This holy man and I were about to find a confessional; you found me on the brink of conversion.”

“No, no,” said Lesgle, freeing himself and retreating towards the door. “I absolve you of all wrongdoing. I am rather tired and cold, and am quite content to be alone, so long as I am warm and dry. I will leave you to your acolyte.”

She advanced towards him, but it was not to prevent his leaving. 

“Oh — well — thank you,” she said, softly. “You really are very sweet. If things hadn’t — well that doesn’t matter. At any rate, take care.” 

She kissed him on the cheek. 

“Do you need any help?” asked the poet, taking in his disheveled state of dress. “You look rather down on your luck.”

Lesgle gave a hollow laugh and made as dignified an exit as was possible.

It was only once he had left the building that he realised he had left the boots behind.

 

Although Lesgle had a good sum of money left, it was devilishly hard getting anyone to take it with bare feet and his clothes hanging off him. Perhaps it didn’t help that his head was spinning and he kept tripping over his words. He was turned away from one hotel after another.

At another time, perhaps, he might have purchased the respectable appearance which would allow him to spend the rest of the money. But Sunday evening was not a good time to shop for clothes, and he wandered around from hostel to inn to boarding house, drunk and unclear in his thoughts, becoming ever muddier and colder and more disheartened. He sat on a low wall and watched groups of students walking home by the glow of the streetlamp. 

A sudden inspiration hit him. He stood up, a little unsteadily, and hastened over to a group of three young men who had just stepped out into the street. They had the student look about them, well dressed but not too well, and, he hoped, not too concerned with being respectable.

“Which of you wants twenty francs?” he asked. “I’ll give you twenty francs to change clothes with me.”

They laughed; he persisted; there followed a haggling over prices.

“Ten extra at least for boots,” said the tallest of the young men, “since you’ve none of your own to trade.”

Another laughed. “Pierre, you ass, don’t tell me you spent ten francs on those things.”

“You swap with him, then.”

“Maybe I will. Say twenty-five? Twenty for clothes, five for shoes. You’ll keep your own shirt.”

“Done,” said Lesgle hastily. 

The young man grinned; he seemed to regard it as a tremendous joke. “Well, where are we to change our clothes? I’m not undressing in the middle of the street. Why! it might cause a scandal.”

Lesgle looked about him. The street tilted and swayed a little. 

“We can go behind that cart there, one at a time,” he said. 

“Capital. You first, though. Hand me out the clothes and the money, then you can stand in that dark corner while I dress myself in turn.”

They shook hands on it, and Lesgle went behind the cart. He folded up the trousers, waistcoat and coat, such as they were, and passed them along with the twenty-five francs to the hands which reached towards him in the darkness. He leaned against the tarpaulin and shivered. The bone-coldness was returning. 

He heard laughter in the street outside, and moving feet. He stepped out into the light. The students were gone. He stumbled towards the end of the street, hoping to catch them, and tripped over his own coat, which had been dropped in a puddle. The rest of the clothes were nowhere to be seen. 

 

If Paris was inhospitable to a man with ragged clothes, it was explicitly hostile to a man with no trousers. He was chased by a group of urchins, who laughed at him, and then by a policeman who seemed to regard him as an escaped lunatic. He thought he had found a place to hide behind a box bush, but a couple, presumably in search of a haven for their amorousness, discovered him, and the lady went into hysterics. In the end he curled up under the quietest bridge he could find. 


	6. Chapter 6

Lesgle was dragged into consciousness by an unexpectedly violent sunrise. Regret had settled upon him overnight, like dew; dew had also settled upon him overnight, like regret. He seemed to have been trampled underfoot by the immense cavalry of a hostile army, and his head still thudded with the clamour of distant hooves. He breathed in, then immediately wished he hadn’t. The resultant coughing fit brought up a sludgy catarrh, and he was struck by how disgusting the human body could make itself. Then he remembered that he wasn’t wearing any trousers. 

He didn’t know what to do next, so he thought he might as well go and get the pamphlets. 

It did not take him long, on a Monday morning, to find someone willing to sell him a pair of moderately respectable trousers, and a waistcoat with only two buttons missing. They did not have any boots in Lesgle’s size, so he took some that were rather too large. 

The shopkeeper’s boy, at least, had a good time out of it; he could not stop laughing, and pronounced it the best story he’d had all week. 

 

Lesgle strolled towards Enjolras and Sons. As he walked, he remembered that Courfeyrac was due to return that day, and allowed his mind to wander in the direction of a comfortable bed and a warm room, brandy and cake, and a good night’s sleep. These air-castles, perhaps, distracted him; he did not notice the carriage until it was almost upon him, and when he tried to step out of its path the new boots flopped loosely about on his feet and caught on a paving stone. 

He felt a sharp pain in his right wrist as he fell onto it at an awkward angle; instinctively he rolled to the side, and watched helplessly as his left arm collided with the moving wheel.

As it did so, he reflected with gratitude that it had, at least, been rather a small carriage. 

 

He had caused something of a commotion. The carriage was halted in the middle of the street, and a circle of bystanders had formed with himself at its centre. This saucer-eyed crowd was quite beside itself with concern and sympathy. Several of the women had already fainted. 

It was all tremendously embarrassing. 

“I’m quite all right,” he said, with an attempt at nonchalance. 

He put his right hand up to hold the torn fabric of his coat in place, and to stop the left arm from hanging at such a very peculiar angle. The effort caused the right wrist to throb, and the pressure on his left arm was scarcely more comfortable. He smiled pleasantly. 

“Really,” he said, “Your concern is misplaced. Have you never seen a man without hair before? It’s a misfortune, certainly, but I do well enough without it. I’m quite well, as you see. If only I had a hat, you would scarcely notice anything wrong with me at all.”

Somehow he maneuvred himself onto his feet without the use of either arm and tottered down the street. 

Another blessing was that the print shop was not far away. Somewhere beneath the dizziness, in the recesses of his mind, he was calculating that he should be able to pick up the pamphlets and take them to Courfeyrac’s apartment in time for a good breakfast. 


	7. Chapter 7

Young Michel Enjolras was behind the counter; he was, at first glance, being lambasted by a customer. Neither of them glanced up at the ringing of the bell as Lesgle came in. 

He would have been surprised to recognise the other member of the _Human Liberation League_ , had he been any more capable of surprise; but he was quite beyond such a thing.

“Look! I tell you,” said the beleaguered Leaguer, striking the air with his hand, “it’s everyone’s concern, it’s the concern of all humanity.”

Young Enjolras was humming in concordance. The elegant lines of his bearing struck a marked contrast with the other man’s frayed sleeves and bristling anger. All of the soft-voiced calm of that first encounter at the law school seemed to have been forgotten. 

“Thousands — _thousands_ — are crying for their motherland, and the voices of great men are silent. Why? Because they’re content to abandon whole nations as easily as Rousseau abandoned his own children.”

“And yet Rousseau is criticised,” chimed in young Enjolras in his clear voice (which sounded even more Southern than it had the other day) “when he himself refused to commit —”

The Leaguer waved his hands about. “No, look, it’s one and the same. A child and a nation. And the current system of government cares nothing for either.”

Lesgle coughed lightly. 

“This gentleman agrees,” said the Leaguer. “Monsieur, can you believe that in 1772 — Holy Mary, you’re bleeding.”

Lesgle smiled and tried to give a shrug with only one arm.

The Leaguer was at his side, all outrage evaporating in an instant.

“Can you move your fingers?” he asked.

Lesgle gave another one-armed shrug. His vision was beginning to sparkle and glimmer.

“Enjolras,” said the Leaguer, “fetch your uncle.”

“My uncle is meeting a client across town,” said young Enjolras, looking somewhat pale. He left his place behind the counter, locked the shop door, and approached Lesgle.

“What’s happened?” he asked, in a low voice full of alarm. “Were you followed here?”

Lesgle smiled wryly. 

“I promise that the carriage has not come after me,” he said. “Although it may have Royalist sympathies. I think I spied a coronet stamped somewhere on the undercarriage.”

Neither of them seemed to see the joke. Enjolras looked him up and down, biting his lip with a solemn air, like a child left in charge of a donkey.

“Feuilly,” he said, “this is Jean-Chauvin Lesgle. He’s a good friend of the shop, and he shares many of our opinions.”

Feuilly nodded. “We’ve met, in fact. And I think he needs to sit down.” 

Enjolras seemed discomforted, but gave a quick nod. 

Lesgle allowed himself to be led, not into a side room, but into the Enjolras residence. Young Michel was guiding him gingerly, his fingers only brushing against the frayed surface of Lesgle’s coat, but Feuilly, on his other side, had his hand around Lesgle’s waist, and gave him the occasional comforting squeeze.

“We should at least find out how bad the bleeding is,” said Enjolras, as they eased Lesgle onto a sofa. “Then I think he’ll need a doctor.”

Feuilly nodded. “I can fetch Joly or Combeferre, if you’d like.”

“Will you have time? When do you need to be at work?” asked Enjolras. 

“It’s on my way, but I’ll have to leave soon. Now, let’s get your coat off. It’s half in pieces, anyway.”

They tried to ease it off him, but his left arm in particular voiced strong objections to being pulled through the sleeve.

“Damn these fashionable cuffs,” said Lesgle. “When I first bought the thing, they were only too small, but then every man and his dog started wearing them tight at the wrists and I thought for once I’d had a bit of luck. More fool me, I suppose.”

“I wonder if it wouldn’t be better done with a knife,” mused Enjolras.

“The Alexandrine approach,” said Lesgle, a little giddily. “The Gordian Coat.”

Feuilly frowned. “It’s not the worst plan, but I suggest scissors instead. You might fetch some brandy, too.”

Enjolras hesitated, then disappeared behind a white-painted door. Lesgle let his eyes rest a little; the darkness behind his eyelids fizzed.

“I don’t imagine you’ve another,” said Feully, “so I’ll do my best to keep it salvageable.”

Lesgle smiled as pleasantly as he could, without opening his eyes. 

 

Enjolras returned in brief measure with a pair of dressmaker’s shears and a brandy-bottle.

“Juliette said to please clean the blood off after, and not to use them on leather,” he said, handing them to Feuilly.

He unscrewed the top of the brandy bottle, and he and Feuilly between them managed to get a mouthful of it poured into Lesgle without too many spills.

Feuilly began to unpick the seams of the coatsleeve, sliding the scissors between stitches with a remarkable delicacy of movement. 

“You should lend me the book,” said Enjolras quietly.

Lesgle felt the excitement run through Feuilly’s fingers as he worked. “Really?” he asked. “Do you know, I’ve been trying to lend it out for weeks, and nobody’s taken me up on it but Combeferre, who’ll read a seed catalogue — no, really, you think I’m joking but I’m not. Anyway, you’ll be glad, I promise. I hardly slept until I’d finished it; when I wasn’t reading I was thinking it over. I was halfway towards confusing the Austro-Prussian border with a border of trailing pansies, and painting the one onto a fan when I was meant to portray the other.”

Enjolras nodded. He was staring at Lesgle’s arm, as the butchered remains of Lesgle’s coat were slid off it and laid to rest upon the floor.

“Well,” said Feuilly, with a suspicious brightness, “it’s not bleeding half as badly I was afraid it would be.”

“On the other hand,” observed Enjolras, “It doesn’t look quite… _right_. I don’t think it ought to be doing… _that_.”

“Well, no, not quite. I’ll drop by Combeferre’s, as I said.”

Feuilly stood up and rolled his sleeves down. He seemed about to extend a hand to shake, then thought better of it and instead gave Lesgle a final squeeze at the top of his right arm.

“Good-bye, M. Lesgle,” he said. “I’m sure when we next meet it’ll be under better circumstances.”

“Of course,” said Lesgle, a little weakly - if he was quite honest, he hadn’t been able to look at the arm at all. 

When he was gone, Enjolras asked softly, “Should I send for your friends?”

“I don’t know,” said Lesgle. “probably. I suppose so.” 

He was still feeling a little light-headed.

“They’ve been searching for you,” said Enjolras. “Or, at least, one of them — the one with the…” 

He made a gesture, in the face area; Lesgle cringed in anticipation, but Enjolras did not seem to notice. 

“..the _moustache_. He was in and out of here yesterday; he seemed to think that you must have come by here. I kept telling him we were closed. Everyone else was out at church. He seemed terribly concerned.”

“Did he now.”

Enjolras looked solemn. 

“He talked a great deal about you. Mostly nonsense, I think. He seemed to think you might have been arrested, or else that you might turn up here at any moment. I think it’s possible he’d been drinking.”

Lesgle gave a short, bark-like laugh which he managed to convert deftly into a fake cough; unfortunately this set off a bout of genuine coughs which left him spluttering.

When the fit was over, and he opened his eyes, they met a pair of blue ones focused intently upon him. They were full of concern and a terrible sincerity. In his head there appeared, all at once, the thought that nobody — not even his own parents — had ever cared about him as much as this young stranger. That was not possible, surely; but he almost believed it all the same.

“Wait here.” said Enjolras, rather abruptly. He hastened out of the room. 

Lesgle looked around him at the sitting room. It was a bright room, well-furnished, everything new and clean. Various parts of him were hurting a good deal. The polished floor tilted from side to side. He decided to rest his eyes once more.


	8. Chapter 8

He only half-opened them when the room was suddenly filled with voices - young Michel, and two more men he didn’t recognise.

“— was helping me with my revision, so you’ve got us two for one.”

“Hullo,” said Lesgle. 

“Hello!” said the shorter of the two strangers. “You do seem to have got into a bit of a scrape.”

“You could say that,” said Lesgle, smiling his blandest smile and forgetting for a minute that waving his hands through the air was inadvisable. The resulting wince rather damaged his attempt at projecting sang-froid.

“Now, Joly, tell me,” said the taller stranger. “Which of the bones is fractured?”

The other, presumably this same Joly, tilted his head to one side, like a pensive robin, and rubbed at his nose with the handle of his cane.

“That’s a trick question, Combeferre, you won’t get me that way. I can see perfectly well that it’s both.”

“Can you name them?”

“Radius and ulna. I bruised my own ulna when I was ten years old and it still troubles me sometimes when it’s damp.”

“And what will we be doing in the case of this break to both radius and ulna?”

“Well — you don’t mind if I touch this just a little, do you?” asked Joly. He was a little flushed, and his expressive face told all Lesgle needed to know about how much this was going to hurt. 

Nonetheless, he was approaching quite confidently, if with a somewhat lopsided gait.

“These men are doctors,” explained young Enjolras, which was, at this point, a little superfluous.

“Medical students,” corrected Combeferre.

“Very well,” said Lesgle. “Get it over with.”

Joly rested the cane against the end of the sofa, and began to poke and prod at his arm with a gentleness that was evident in his expression if not in the sensation. 

“It’s a clean break,” he said finally. “No compounding, no fragments. The nerves are in good order, and the pulse in the wrist is strong. The end of one finger’s missing, but that’s from an old injury which is well healed. The contracture of the forearm muscles is what has pulled the arm into this peculiar shape. Fortunately the musculature is not so developed as in, for example, the thigh, and so it’s quite possible to set the bones by hand. We splint it and bandage firmly. Oh! Your other wrist is awfully big.”

“I fell on it,” said Lesgle, with a grin that was more instinctive than anything.

“Let me look - I think it’s just a bad sprain. Still, you’ll be pretty much handless for about a week, like the girl in the story. I always liked her. What do you think, Combeferre, shall I pass?”

“More or less, I think. Let me see. Do you think you can hold him still?”

Combeferre came closer to him and inspected first one injury and then the other. 

“Can you hear the _crepitus?_ ” he asked. “That’s the sound of the bones moving against one another; it’s diagnostic. Jean-Chauvin Lesgle, isn’t it? I believe I know you by reputation, although I hoped we would meet under rather better circumstances. When you’re feeling better we really must talk some time about Universal Education.”

Lesgle winced. 

“We can give you something for the pain when this is done. Until then, I’m afraid you’ll have to bear it.”

“Sometimes pain must be borne,” said young Enjolras softly, “because it is necessary.”

Combeferre shot him a sharp look. 

“It’s far from _necessary_ ,” he said. “Men are working even now to discover new ways of dulling the senses before operating. Before the decade is out, I am sure we will have a way to set a wrist painlessly. I am only sorry that it will be too late to save you from suffering right now.”

“Don’t be,” said Lesgle, with his best breezy air. “I can assure you I’m quite used to this sort of thing.”

“Very well,” said Combeferre. “Joly, make sure to hold him as firmly as you can.”

Combeferre, head down, did something dreadful to Lesgle’s left arm as he continued to talk.

“If we accept the necessity of causing pain, it relieves us of our duty to avoid it; and so mankind ceases to progress, and remains bounded and backward, trapped in the limitations of previous ages. What we call necessity is another form of bondage; it is in our power to break it, as we can break all others. We can liberate ourselves even from gravity — even from that! — and soar heavenward. Can we not make a heaven here on the ground then? Can’t elevate ourselves morally, as much as physically?”

“And yet,” said young Enjolras, “you haven’t delayed this operation.”

“Combeferre,” asked Joly, looking oddly amused, “Do we have enough bandages?”

Combeferre humphed.

“Probably not, with the second injury,” he said. “Enjolras, do you think you might have something about the house? Some old sheets will do, or strips of linen. Oh, and larger pieces, for a sling.”

“They’ve been like this for weeks,” whispered Joly into Lesgle’s ear, as Combeferre and Enjolras conferred. His mouth was twitching, and Lesgle realised he was holding back laughter.

Then his face softened. 

“You’re all right, aren’t you?” he asked. “You look awfully pale, but you’ve borne it pretty well so far. Can you keep going?”

Lesgle nodded, feeling an odd warmth in his chest.

Then Enjolras left, and Combeferre started doing unpleasant things to Lesgle’s arm once more, and Lesgle remembered that he was still cold and miserable, and that his chest was mostly full of phlegm. He started to cough again. Joly brought out a handkerchief and brought it up to his mouth, and Lesgle coughed until his face was hot and then, resignedly, allowed a stranger to assist him in blowing his nose.

“There’s a crackle to that I don’t like,” said Combeferre, when they were done. 

“Combeferre,” said Joly. He looked altogether too excited for Lesgle to be entirely comfortable.

“Joly,” said Combeferre. 

“Do you have it with you? Can we use it? We _should_ use it, shouldn’t we?”

His head was bobbing up and down, and he was rocking back and forth from one foot to another. Meanwhile Combeferre himself seemed not unaffected. He had a rather terrifying glint in his eye.

“Well,” he said, “It would be rather neglectful not to, don’t you think?”

Joly turned to Lesgle. “We’d like to examine your lungs,” he said. “But I’ll need to take off your shirt and waistcoat, if you don’t mind.”

It seemed to Lesgle that one would need to take off rather more than that to get at his lungs, but he was past caring and a long way beyond dignity. Joly undressed him with exaggerated care. Then the two doctors brought out a laquered wooden case. 

Lesgle sighed. In his experience, it was never a good sign when doctors brought out a lacquered wooden case. 

This case, at least, did not contain anything sharp: only some bits of pipe, which they screwed together reverently. There then began a bizarre ritual, wherein one doctor — usually it was Joly who went first — would press one of the pipe’s ends against Lesgle’s back or chest and put his ear against the other. Then he would hit Lesgle several times in the ribs, sometimes moving the pipe back and forth a few inches. Finally he would pass it to his colleague with a few muttered opacities, and the other man would repeat the same thing. 

They did this, swapping back and forth, for some time, in different locations across Lesgle’s torso. If it was not the oddest thing that had happened to Lesgle in recent memory, that was only because recent memory was rather overcrowded with oddities. 

At last the doctors nodded at one another sagely, and Combeferre began to unscrew and put away the piping. Joly looked Lesgle earnestly in the eye, and said, 

“You have rather a bad cold, but it is not tubercular, and the lobes are clear.”

Lesgle had not known that there was any danger of it being tubercular, nor did he know what on earth the lobes were or what state they ought to be in, but he supposed he was glad to hear the news.

Enjolras had returned with more bandages, and so when Joly had dressed Lesgle, he and Combeferre jointly set to work. When both arms were bound up in yards of white linen, they were hung from his neck with a pair of slings. Then Joly gave Lesgle a horrid liquid to drink and stood back and looked at him. Combeferre stood beside him and looked at Lesgle too. 

“Well,” said Joly finally. “What are we going to do with him?”

Combeferre sighed. 

“I really don’t know,” he said. “What I don’t understand is how he got into this state in the first place. Listen, Lesgle — I hope you don’t mind my asking this, but what on earth happened to you? Aren’t you a student at the law school? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d been living under a bridge for the past week.”

“Oh no,” said Lesgle, “It was much less than a week. Only a couple of days, really. And it was something of an accident. Or rather, a series of accidents.”

Combeferre and Joly shared a look. 

“Well, I’m not letting him go home with you,” said Joly. “Your rooms are full of dead insects and the worst sorts of chemicals, and you’ve covered the spare bed with clock parts. He will trip over a stack of books or some sort of machine and crack his head open on a fossil. Don’t try to deny it.”

“I wasn’t intending to,” said Combeferre. “Nor to challenge your right, since you’ve decided to assert it. I would like to point out, however, that you don’t even have a spare bed.”

“I’ll sleep on the floor. Or possibly on the armchair. I haven’t decided.”

“I’m going to be hearing about your back for months,” said Combeferre, although he seemed to be teasing more than objecting. 

Lesgle had begun to feel very sleepy. He was not exactly comfortable, but he was less uncomfortable than he had been in some time. He let his head drop softly onto the sofa-cushions. 

“Oh no!” exclaimed Joly. “Not yet, you don’t. Let’s get you home. I think a cab is called for, don’t you, Combeferre?”

“That sounds like a good plan,” said Combeferre. “I’ll come with you. I have a feeling you’re going to have a hard time getting him up the stairs.”

“I sent word to his friends — should I direct them on to you?” asked young Enjolras.

“Please do. I’m sure they’ll be very anxious to see him. Here, you should take my address...”


	9. Chapter 9

Lesgle did not remember much after that; only a hazy sense that he was riding in a carriage to some far away land, and that he was in good company. Then he was in a bed, between clean white sheets, and the light was pouring through a large window, and he was sure he heard Bahorel talking, but perhaps that was only a dream. The next time he woke, it was dark, and there was someone else in the bed beside him. 

“Oh,” said Joly. “You’re awake.”

“After a fashion,” said Lesgle. 

“I hope you don’t mind that I got into the bed. Only — Combeferre was right, about my back. And there’s a sort of cold about the kidneys which is very bad for one at this time of year. And I thought I could keep a better eye on you here. And it’s quite a large bed, really.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Lesgle. 

“That’s good, then.”

They lay quietly for a moment or two. 

“In fact, I feel tremendously contented,” said Lesgle. 

“That’s the opium, I expect. I thought it was better to give you too much than too little. Is your mouth dry? I can fetch some water, if you like.”

“In a minute, perhaps.”

“You know, all this is a terrific stroke of luck.”

Lesgle was baffled. “How do you make that out?”

“Well, we’ve been trying to make contact with your group for a while now. We even found one of your men at the law school — or, at least, my friends did, and he gave them an address, but I think they took it down wrong because we couldn’t find the street at all. It was a mistake, I think, to have Prouvaire write it out. He’s so very fanciful and vague. It comes with being a poet, I suppose, but he isn’t to be relied on for concrete particulars.”

A little voice in the midst of Lesgle’s placid thoughts said _oh no_ , but it was like a tiny bell trying to sound a great alarm.

“But now I have you right here! And I’m sure your friends will come by as well. It’s a perfect opportunity. You really must talk to Combeferre, he has such a way of articulating things. I’m sure I’ll never match him as a speaker or a writer, although I do hope as a scientist, perhaps one day —”

Something fell into place in Lesgle’s mind, like the keystone of a bridge.

“ _Condorcet_ ,” he said. 

“Did you read our pamphlet, then? I hope you read Feuilly’s essay too. We thought you might like that one especially, because of the focus on education. It was so exciting to find another educational society. We all believe it is the way that humankind will liberate itself. Oh! Why are you laughing! Oh no!”

Lesgle’s laughs had made him sneeze, and then cough a little; Joly gently lifted him upright, and held him there with a handkerchief at his mouth until it was done.

“Do tell me what’s so funny,” he said. 

Lesgle lay back on the pillow, exhausted. 

“ _The Society for Universal Education_ ,” he said, “is so called because my friend Bahorel has always said that there is one way to educate the bourgeoisie, and that is with fisticuffs.”

“Oh.”

“He says it is vital to educate as many as possible.”

Now it was Joly who began to giggle. It was a very delightful giggle. He went pink from neck to ears. It was impossible not to join in, and still less possible for either one of them to stop once they had started. They managed to pause a few times, once long enough for Joly to start blowing Lesgle’s nose - but then Lesgle made a face which set Joly off again, and they were back where they began.

“Well,” said Joly, at last. “Perhaps we’ll have something to offer one another regardless.”

“You know what, perhaps we will.”

“I think you should probably get some sleep now, though. Are you in any pain?”

“Only a very little, and it’s very strange, you know, I feel as if it’s a sort of pain I don’t care about at all.”

“That’s the opium, again, I think. You’ll have to tell me about your dreams.”

Lesgle made a small sound of agreement. There was something very reassuring about having Joly in the bed beside him. _Like an anchor_ , he thought, and then, _like being at home._ But he was getting confused, because neither of those were something a person could be, not really; and then it seemed that his head was full of voices again, speaking over one another and to one another, voices he knew well and others he knew less well, but all of them sounding like friends; and then, at last, the voice, for some reason, of young Michel Enjolras, soft and clear, saying: Sleep. We only have a few hours, and you should get some rest, all of you. That’s an order.

And so he slept.


End file.
